Matthew Singer

Zombies – they’re just like us. In fact, they literally are us, just, y’know, a bit slower, in both senses of the term. Perhaps that bit of shared lineage – the knowledge that, no matter how rotted, feral and brain-hungry they become, they’re still humans at heart – explains why zombie mythology persists in popular culture. Ever since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead established the modern template for the zombie movie, the undead have continued to walk among us, with HBO’s The Last of Us being only the most recent example. (Okay, it’s technically about a ‘fungal apocalypse’ that turns people into murderous mushrooms, but c’mon: it’s a zombie show at heart.)  The concept is malleable enough to serve as allegories for real-world issues from racism to consumerism, and also naturally gory enough that if you simply want to make (or watch) a disgusting splatterfest, well, there’s no better genre.  Whatever the reason for its enduring popularity, zombies have exerted a powerful pull on movies for decades now. Of course, they’ve also produced a mass grave of schlock. So we decided to sort the sharp from the shambling and come up with a list of the greatest zombie flicks ever made. From classics to cult favourites, zom-coms to willpower-testing gross-outs, these are the best of the undead best.  Recommended: 😱 The 100 best horror movies of all-time👹 The best monster movies of all-time🔪 The 31 best serial killer movies of all-time🤘 The 40 best cult movies of all-time

Movie monsters come in many shapes and sizes. Some are as big as skyscrapers, others as small as slugs. Some are fast, some are slow, some are gelatinous globs of goo with no defined shape at all. Really, there are as many kinds of cinematic monsters as there are individual human fears for them to represent.  Obviously, that leaves us with a pretty big field to choose from. Putting together this list of the greatest monster movies ever made and keeping it to a reasonable number required putting a few parameters in place. First off, no zombies or vampires. There are simply too many, and those warrant lists of their own. Secondly, no humans – apologies to Freddy, Jason, Michael and Henry from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. You’re monstrous, but you’re not monsters.  Instead, we opted for all the killer rabbits, killer plants, killer fish, killer clowns, killer aliens and killer giant sandworms – and that still made it really hard to pare down. Here’s our best shot. Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Andy Kryza, Paul Fairclough, David Jenkins & Matthew Singer Recommended: 💀 The 100 best horror movies of all-time👽 The 100 best sci-fi movies of all-time🧟 The best zombie movies of all-time🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 

  We’re living in prudish times. If you haven’t been keeping up with the online discourse, the merits of cinematic sex has become an ongoing point of debate on social media – and, oddly, it seems to be one of the few things ostensibly liberal zoomers and pearl-clutching religious conservatives can agree on. According to the internet commentariat, sex in movies, for the most part, is bad. It’s no wonder, really, considering that movies themselves have, over the last two decades, taken a turn for the chaste. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, though, you couldn’t throw an ice pick in the general direction of a movie theater without stabbing Michael Douglas’s bare ass. That is to say, for a relatively brief moment of time, erotic thrillers – films intertwining sex and violence into a deliciously lurid, adults-only cocktail – ruled the multiplex. Sure, they were often problematic, and almost always trashy. But the onscreen sexlessness of the past 20 years has left us nostalgic for the simple, sleazy pleasures of the erotic thriller era. So we decided to revisit (and rank) 35 of the all-time best. Many remain difficult to justify in this time of sexual puritanism – but that might be the exact reason we love them so much.  Recommended: 🍆 The 101 best sex scenes in movies😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time😍 The 100 best romantic films of all-time 🕵️ 40 murder mystery movies to test your sleuthing skills to the max🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

It took a while for Irish movies to break out internationally – in fact, peruse this list of the best Irish films and you’ll notice most of them are from the ’90s and early 2000s. It’s still rare for a movie from the Emerald Isle to reach a global audience. But those that do tend to stick with you. Think about the humble romantic musical Once, or Daniel Day-Lewis’s star-making turn in Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, or Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated existential character study The Banshees of Inisherin. Regardless of the genre, the best Irish movies exude a particular, idiosyncratic soul reflective of the country’s history, culture and, especially, its people. You don’t have to save these classics for St Patrick’s Day – but if you’re happening to be on the market for a suggestion to mark the holiday, look no further than these 13 cracking selections. Recommended: 🗼 The 50 best films set in Paris💂‍♀️ The 32 best London movies☘ The 15 best Irish songs for St. Patrick’s Day

Science fiction isn’t just for nerds anymore. In fact, that’s been true long enough that for a certain generation, it probably seems bizarre that the genre wasn’t always so popular. But the reality is that sci-fi was never meant to appeal only to a small niche. Science-fiction films might frequently create entirely new worlds, but the best of them do what any good movie should do and tell us about the world we actually live in. They deal with relatable issues and themes, not just the geeks writing novel-length theoretical treatises on fan forums. To that end, in order to put together our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies ever made, we asked a wide-ranging panel of experts, from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, to Oscar-decorated film director Guillermo del Toro, to Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin, along with a few regular old Time Out writers. As a result, it’s a list that crisscrosses the sci-fi universe, from Tatooine to Arrakis, Metropolis to Los Angeles circa, uh, 2019.    Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time😲 The 100 best thrillers of all-time🧨 The 101 best action movies of all-time

It’s not easy being a mum. You’ve likely heard the old line about how it’s the hardest job that exists, but it’s a cliché for a reason – it’s the one occupation from which you never get a break, at least not until your kids all turn 18 and get the hell out of the house. That’s why it’s almost insulting that the world’s mothers only get a single day of celebration. That’s not to say you shouldn’t go over the top for the materfamilias in your life on Mother’s Day. We just wish there was a way to give every mama their proper props. But that is, of course, impossible.   The best we can do is this list of the most movie moms in film history. Here, we pay homage to the full breadth of motherhood, shouting out the sweet and nurturing and the exhausted and demanding in equal measure. Like we said, being a mom is tough, and perfection isn’t always attainable. But whether they’re protecting us from cyborg assassins or committing serial murder, a mom is still a mom. So let’s all raise a glass – preferably filled with mid-priced Chardonnay – to the greatest movie matriarchs of all time. Recommended: 🤰 The best Mother’s Day movies to watch🕴 The 10 most extreme movie dads💑 The 100 best romantic movies of all-time🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

In Hollywood, the truth is relative. A lot of the time, when a movie claims to be based on actual events, it means there’s a small grain of reality buried in a haystack of dramatic embellishments, to the point that the literal ‘true story’ of the matter becomes so distorted it hardly even qualifies as truth. Sometimes, though, a story is so mind-blowing that the truth needs no stretching to fit on the big screen. The films on this list are examples of the latter. In these movies, the truth is approached with something close to a journalistic eye – not that any would qualify as a documentary, just that the facts are represented better than most, simply because the stories are so spectacular a screenwriter would hardly come up with anything better. Some are earth-shaking historical events, others are tales of true crime ripped from the headlines. They include peculiar character studies and psychedelic drug trips that challenge the definition of truth itself. In each case, these films prove that truth is often stranger than fiction – and sometimes makes for even better movies. Recommended: 📹 The 65 best documentaries of all-time😱 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories🔎 The best true crime documentaries on Netflix🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

Call it a hot take if you want, but there is no greater feat in cinema than creating a timeless comedy. That’s because no film genre ages worse. Drama, horror and romance movies all tap into innate human desires and anxieties that anyone from any generation can understand. Even action flicks live longer in the cultural imagination – the thrill that comes from seeing stuff get blowed up real good is universal. But comedy is all about context. What’s funny in 1923 might not make a lick of sense to 2023 audiences. Humour is also deeply individualistic: one person’s ROTFLMAO is another’s shrug emoji. That makes coming up with the best comedy films of all-time especially challenging. There’s a lot that goes into identifying truly great comedy, but the main one has to do with durability. Is this film still funny now, and will it still be years from now? In sorting the GOATs from the groaners, we enlisted the help of comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers. And the films we came up with represent the 100 most hilarious – and most lasting – laughers ever made. We can’t be sure they’ll all make you laugh. But if they don’t… well, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem. Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🥰 The greatest romantic comedies of all time🤯 33 great disaster movies😬 The best thriller films of all-time🌏 The best foreign films of all-time

If you’re passionate about film, chances are your first love was a cartoon. It may have been something from the Golden Age of Disney or their 1990s renaissance, or possibly a Pixar tearjerker. If your parents were a bit more worldly, it could have been a Studio Ghibli masterpiece – or maybe they just grabbed something off a video store shelf they assumed was age appropriate and accidentally opened your mind to the weirder corners of the animation realm.  Either way, animation is frequently where most cinematic obsessions start. As proof, consider this list of the greatest animated movies of all-time. In composing this list, we polled everyone from Fantastic Mr Fox director Wes Anderson and Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, along with several Time Out writers and experts, and the results show just how broad the genre can be. Our list incorporates the standard-bearers from North America and Japan, plus stop-motion nightmares to psychedelic headtrips, illustrated documentaries to unclassifiable avant-garde experiments. You’ll see a lot of old childhood favourites, sure – but there might even be some new adult faves to consider as well.  Written by Trevor Johnston, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkoph, Tom Huddleston, Andy Kryza, Guy Lodge, Dave Calhoun, Keith Uhlich, Cath Clarke and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🐭 The 50 best Disney movies🇯🇵 The 20 best anime movies of all-time🤣 The best family comedy movies🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time  

Like Christmas morning or the Super Bowl, the Oscars are all about the build-up. Sure, sometimes the ceremony lives up to the hype of being ‘Hollywood’s biggest night’, with a few thrilling upsets, memorable speeches, bizarre Best Original Song performances, awkward interactions between mismatched presenters and maybe a swear word or two sneaking past censors. Most of the time, though, the excitement peaks a week or two before the telecast, as fans and pundits alike try to predict winners and work overtime to convince themselves that, hey, maybe that weird little indie success story has a fighting chance against the tepid period drama everyone’s convinced will take home the big prize. Unusually, there aren’t many ‘wrong choices’ for the Academy to make this year. Unlike in recent years, there’s no true ‘villain nominee’ threatening to send social media into convulsions of outrage, nor are there many likeable-if-unexciting safe picks to make viewers shrug. In fact, the frontrunner just might be the weirdest flick with a chance to dominate in the history of the awards. Still, it’s hard to say what will happen – but we have some ideas of what should happen. Here are our 2023 Oscar predictions. Recommended: 🏆 Everything you need to know about this year’s Academy Awards🤔 Six things we learned from the Oscar nominations🌟 The best films of 2022👍 The 50 most deserving Oscar winners of all-time

When curating lists of the best movies available on various streaming platforms, the task is often akin to pulling a Michelin-star meal from a mountain of rotten fruit. That is to say, digging through the endless scroll of crap to find the stuff worth watching. In the case of Amazon Prime, it’s more a matter of skimming the cream of the crop from an almost overwhelmingly fount of options. But when it comes to movie libraries, Jeff Bezos’s posse has Netflix absolutely beat. You’ll find everything from ’60s essentials to last year’s arthouse hits, ’80s blockbusters to cult classics.  But that, of course, brings its own problems: if you’re spending hours scrolling for something to watch, it’s probably because there are almost too many good things on offer. We’re here to help, though. Below, you’ll find our picks for the 30 best movies available for free for Amazon Prime subscribers in the UK right at this moment.  Recommended: 🅽 The 30 best movies on Netflix UK🔥 21 best free movies to watch on YouTube😍 The 100 best romantic films of all time

Sometimes, all you want out of a movie is to make you feel good. It’s a stressful world, especially these days, and the best way to snap out of a funk is to flop on the couch, lock the door, and throw something light and easy on Netflix. And good for you, the streamer has plenty of cinematic sunshine waiting to be injected directly into your nervous system. It’s important to know what you’re putting on, however. Not every movie is designed to provide the dopamine rush to help ease your anxiety; some will make it worse. So before taking a hit of vitamin PG, peruse this list of musicals, romantic comedies and animated flicks comprising the 25 best feel good movies currently on Netflix in the UK. They’re guaranteed to cure what ails you.  Recommended: 🤣 The 100 best comedy movies💃 The 40 best musical movies👪 The best family movies on Netflix for all ages

Already a smash hit in the US, all eight episodes of ‘The Bear’ have finally arrived on Disney+ in the UK and Ireland. The FX dramedy, set in the kitchen of a blue-collar Chicago sandwich shop and starring the about-to-be-huge Jeremy Allen White, has generated a tonne of buzz since its first dropped on Hulu across the Pond.Created by Christopher Storer, it centres on an up-and-coming chef who inherits his family’s struggling greasy spoon following the sudden death of his brother. It’s earned critical raves for its breakout cast and sharply observed writing, which manages to convey a lot about grief and masculinity despite dealing with some not particularly articulate characters. And it’s already been renewed for a second season. So if you want to keep up with the zeitgeist, you’ll probably want to jump in as soon as it lands on the streamer. And if you’re wondering if it’s worth the four-hour investment, here are the five best reasons to watch. Photograph: Matt Dinerstein/FXWhite with Liza Colon-Zayas as Tina 1. Jeremy Allen White is basically a young Nicolas Cage First and foremost, ‘The Bear’ heralds the arrival of Jeremy Allen White. Okay, perhaps that’s a weird thing to say, given that he just wrapped up a ten-year stint as a lead on the US version of Shameless. But in his first true star vehicle, White shines as Carmen ‘Carmy’ Bezatto, aka Bear, a hot-shit young chef with hypnotic eyes and a wounded demeanour. White spent two weeks in culinary school to prepare for the

Damien Chazelle is returning to La La Land… But the director’s new movie is about a much different Los Angeles than that of his 2016 musical. In his upcoming Babylon, the 37-year-old filmmaker travels back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, a particularly grand and debauched time in the entertainment industry. It’s Chazelle’s first movie since 2018’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man and the first he’s written since La La Land made him the youngest Best Director winner in Oscar history. And according to Chazelle, it’s his most ambitious project yet. ‘It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve done,’ he tells Vanity Fair. ‘Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the scale of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie charts – it all conspired to make it particularly challenging, but it was a challenge that was pretty exciting to take on.’ Chazelle says he’s had the idea for Babylon in his head since even before his breakthrough film, 2014’s Whiplash, but didn’t yet have the clout to do something so ‘massive’. He finally started working on the script in 2018, but then the pandemic stalled production. After screening teaser footage for a convention audience earlier this year, Babylon is finally nearing release – and it looks like another Oscar contender. Here’s everything we know about Babylon.   Photo Credit: Scott Garfield| Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures. When does Babylon come out? It hits theatres in select US cities on Decemb

It’s the kind of true crime story episodes of Dateline are made of: a mild-mannered dentist in upstate New York is accused of killing the husband of the woman he’d been having an affair with. The murder weapon? A poison highly specific to his profession.  But that’s truly just the beginning of the bizarre twists and high drama of My Dentist’s Murder Trial, an upcoming limited series from HBO based on a 2017 New Yorker article. Written by a journalist who was also one of the dentist in question’s longtime patients, the piece adds a level of meta-narrative that lifts the tale above its sordid, soap-operatic details and made it the sort of story worthy of HBO – and some top-class actors – rather than, say, the Lifetime channel.     Here’s what we know about the series so far: When is My Dentist’s Murder Trial on HBO? According to Variety, the show is in early development as of July 2022, and no release date has been set – and given the recent tumult at the ol’ Home Box Office, let’s just hope it gets released at all. Who is starring in My Dentist’s Murder Trial? So far, only two names are confirmed to be involved in the project. One is Pedro Pascal, the Chilean-born actor best known for his starring role in The Mandalorian and who’s also turned up in Game of Thrones, Narcos and HBO’s highly anticipated upcoming video-game adaptation The Last of Us. He’s slated to play the dentist of the title, Dr Gilberto Nunez, who in 2017 was accused of killing his friend. The other name is Da

David O Russell is back, and that’s something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the Silver Linings Playbook director’s new movie, Amsterdam, looks like one of the year’s first true award contenders, a high-energy 1930s period piece with an absolutely loaded cast. Like, everyone is in it. Everyone.  The problem is Russell himself. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has long been known as an on-set tyrant, and the release of the Amsterdam’s trailer has dredged up an even more disturbing accusation of sexual assault, levied against him by his own niece in 2011.  How might those resurfaced allegations affect the critical and audience response to the film? It’s hard to predict at this point. But here’s everything we do know about Amsterdam – and about Russell’s past misdeeds.  Photograph: Courtesy of 20th Century StudiosZoe Saldana as Irma When does Amsterdam come out? It’s scheduled to hit theatres – no streaming, for now – on November 4, 2022. Is there a trailer for Amsterdam? There is and you can watch it below. What’s Amsterdam about? While the trailer gives an overview of the tone (comedic and caper-y), the time period (1930s) and the massive cast (see below), it doesn’t reveal much about the actual plot. The official synopsis describes it as ‘an original crime epic about three close friends who find themselves at the centre of one of the most shocking secret plots in American history.’ And the trailer plays up that the film is loosely b

When Disney first released the family-friendly horror-comedy Hocus Pocus in 1993, audiences did not immediately fall under its spell. Critics were unamused, and it bombed at the box office. But like the trio of witchy sisters at its centre, the movie found a second life, both on home video and cable - not to mention among cosplayers and drag performers. For a generation of ’90s kids, no Halloween is complete without a viewing. Now, after years of rumours, fan campaigns and public nudging from its stars, the film is finally getting a sequel. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy are all back, reprising their roles as the Sanderson sisters, the goofily sinister trio of 17th century witches who have a serious bone to pick with the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts. The involvement of the original cast is probably all Hocus Pocus fans need to make the sequel must-watch. But here’s everything else we know right now about Hocus Pocus 2.     When will Hocus Pocus 2 be released? It’s scheduled to hit Disney+ on September 30 – just in time for the start of spooky season. Is there a trailer for Hocus Pocus 2? Behold! What happened in the original Hocus Pocus? On Halloween 1993, young residents of Salem unwittingly resurrect three witch sisters who were executed by the townsfolk 300 years prior by lighting the cursed Black Flame Candle. By the rules of the spell that brought them back to life, they must steal a child’s life force by sun-up to stay

Calling all gambling addicts, refugees, old men with terminal diseases, laid-off Netflix employees and other financially desperate folks: Netflix wants to cast you to compete in a real-life Squid Game. In a dystopian twist straight out of a very meta Black Mirror episode, the streaming platform is literally turning its most-watched original series – which, as you might recall, involves a competition in which players perform a series of kids’ games, with the losers being murdered on the spot – into an actual reality show. Like the fictional Squid Game, Squid: The Challenge will involve 456 contestants competing for a sum of money: in this case, $4.56 million – supposedly the largest prize in TV history. Netflix is calling it ‘the biggest reality competition series ever,’ while also ominously referring to it as a ‘social experiment.’   ‘As they compete through a series of games inspired by the original show – plus surprising new additions – their strategies, alliances, and character will be put to the test while competitors are eliminated around them,’ reads the Netflix statement. ‘The stakes are high, but in this game the worst fate is going home empty-handed.’   The casting page notes that ‘win or lose, all players will leave unscathed’, which is a relief to hear. Still, creating a ‘real’ Squid Game seems like a rather audacious misreading of the show’s critique of the Korean class system and capitalism in general. Then again, this isn’t the first time someone with a b

Can it really be true that the world is only now, in the year 2022, getting a gay romantic comedy from a major Hollywood studio written by an openly gay person? Somehow it is. But the good news is that Hollywood given the honour of making it to Billy Eichner, whose dyspeptic comic sensibilities ensure that it definitely won’t just be a queer-themed Hallmark movie. Bros, co-written by Eichner and Nicholas Stoller, who also directs, is described as ‘a smart, swoony and heartfelt comedy about how hard it is to find another tolerable human being to go through life with’, which doesn’t sound too far off in spirit from Eichner’s Hulu series about caustic besties, Difficult People. Eichner also stars, alongside a majority-LGBTQ+ supporting cast occupying both gay and straight roles – another first.    All those milestones are great, but they’ll matter much less if the movie doesn’t ring true for the community the film is aimed at – something Eichner is keenly aware of. ‘[While] I wanted to make a movie that was hilarious and relatable to everyone, first and foremost I wanted to make a movie that felt authentic for the LGBTQ folks that the movie is about,’ says Eichner, ‘and who have been so profoundly underserved by Hollywood over the years, particularly the major movie studios.’ Will Bros live up to its historic billing? We won’t know for a few more months. But here’s everything we do know about Bros right now. When is Bros out? Originally due out in August, Bros will now land in U

In the span of three films, Key & Peele sketch comedian-turned-horror auteur Jordan Peele has entered the increasingly rarefied tier of director whose name generates intense anticipation around any project it’s attached to. In short, he’s one of the coolest filmmakers on the planet. Part of the reason for that, of course, his movies have lived up to the hype: both his smash 2017 debut, Get Out, and the follow-up, 2019’s Us, mixed horror and lacerating social satire with the skill of George A Romero at his best. But it’s also because he’s uniquely adept at the art of the tease. Last summer, Peele unveiled the poster for his latest feature, Nope. It only provided the title, cast and release date, but the Stephen King-like central image – an ominous cloud hovering above a lit-up town, a kite string dangling from its base – was enough to send the internet’s collective imagination racing. Then, during Super Bowl weekend, the first trailer dropped, tantalising audiences further – but revealing only a handful of additional clues.  That hasn’t stopped us from scraping up whatever information we can, though. Here’s everything we know about Nope. When is Nope coming out? One of the few things we can say about Nope with absolute certainty is the release date: July 22, 2022. Universal is pitching it as a ‘new pop nightmare’ and Peele’s first foray into summer blockbuster territory (Get Out and Us were both autumn releases). Reportedly, the film will bypass streaming services and debut ex